Category: Digital Imaging

Justin Guariglia – The Printed Surface As An Artifact

August 24, 2017 by Patrick

Watch The Video: The video was removed because of autoplay.

While I am attracted to the subject matter and imagery that Justin Guariglia is working with. For the purposes of this post I am most interested in his unique approach to photographic printing. From my past posts on Factum Arte’s multilayered printing process, you can see this is a subject that intrigues me. An artist shouldn’t just be reduced to process but it’s the process that really peaks my interest. Thankfully in Guariglia’s work, both are tightly combined.

He coined and trademarked the term “Plasticene Printing” to describe the process of printing, sometimes in multiple layers, with UV cured polymer or resin inks on surfaces wich are slow to break down over time, such as aluminum and polystyrene. Process and concept collide wonderfully here, using materials and processes that speak directly to the time scales in the landscapes and global process that he is capturing. The term is also a play of Anthropocene time period we live in, due to the measurable presence of plastics in our environment and the impact we are having on the geology and ecosystem of our planet.

Glacial Facade Study II by Justin Guariglia

Image © Justin Guariglia

The use of large formate flatbed LED UV inkjet printers (swissqprint) gives Guariglia the ability to print on a multitude of surfaces that don’t easily work within traditional chemical or inkjet processes. The UV cured inks, particularly when used with the flatbed layout, allow for registered multilayered printing. In Guariglia’s case, this gives some of his work a three dimensional quality as multiple layers of cured resin build up. Traditionally flat works can have dimensionality without having to first manipulate the printing surface as the source.

Painting with Timescale – teamLab’s Time-blossoming Flowers – Taiwan

February 19, 2017 by Patrick

One of the beautiful aspects of digital video and audio that I fell in love with when first exploring the mediums, was the introduction of a time scale. teamLab’s Time-blossoming Flowers is a wonderful example of this. In none narrative works, in particular, timescale changes the experience of a work. The subtlety in which something can change and transform over time can add a wonderful undercurrent to a work. A traditional video has its limitations in that regards as there is almost always an upper limit on time. With generative and 3d imagery that time limit can be broken. In that space imagery can constantly be changing, never the same.

That’s the beauty of teamLab’s Time-blossoming Flowers – Taiwan. It changes from hour to hour, day to day, all year long. The work has a timeline on a human scale. It allows for a subtlety that would be otherwise hard to create or experience. As an installation piece, it allows people to interact with it and observe it in a way that would be difficult in a traditional viewing space. It seems to be a work that is meant to be lived with as it lives with you, growing and changing throughout the year, catching your eye and bringing you back to it time and time again to experience the differences.

The piece truly is timeless.

https://youtu.be/CeO3jSwNueg

From the project page

The appearance of the work changes throughout the day. It grows light with the sunrise, glows with the sunset, and darkens as the night sets in. The artwork is in sync with the actual sunrise and sunset every day at this location.

The flowers of Taiwan bloom one after the other as the seasons change with the passage of time throughout the year. The flowers known as the Four Gentlemen, the orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum, and plum, are used to represent the four seasons. The flowers sprout, then grow, bud, and bloom. Before long they scatter, wither, and fade away. In this way, the flowers continue their infinite cycle of birth and death.

Artistic Style Transfer for Videos – Danil Krivoruchko’s NYC Flow

July 27, 2016 by Patrick

https://vimeo.com/175540110

The open source code produced by Manuel Ruder, Alexey Dosovitskiy and Thomas Brox was used in generating the final render of NYC Flow.

In the past, manually re-drawing an image in a certain artistic style required a professional artist and a long time. Doing this for a video sequence single-handed was beyond imagination. Nowadays computers provide new possibilities. We present an approach that transfers the style from one image (for example, a painting) to a whole video sequence. We make use of recent advances in style transfer in still images and propose new initializations and loss functions applicable to videos. This allows us to generate consistent and stable stylized video sequences, even in cases with large motion and strong occlusion. We show that the proposed method clearly outperforms simpler baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khuj4ASldmU

Artistic style transfer for videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khuj4ASldmU)

Style transfer for videos, as described in the paper “Artistic style transfer for videos” by Manuel Ruder, Alexey Dosovitskiy and Thomas Brox https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.08610

Creating A Painting – Machine Learning and The Next Rembrandt

April 7, 2016 by Patrick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygOYZ1Ngo

The Next Rembrandt (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygOYZ1Ngo)

The new portrait is the product of 18 months of analysis of 346 paintings and 150 gigabytes of digitally rendered graphics.

Everything about the painting — from the subject matter (a Caucasian man between the age of 30 and 40) to his clothes (black, wide-brimmed hat, black shirt and white collar), facial hair (small mustache and goatee) and even the way his face is positioned (facing right) — was distilled from Rembrandt’s body of work.

We created a height map using two different algorithms that found texture patterns of canvas surfaces and layers of paint. That information was transformed into height data, allowing us to mimic the brushstrokes used by Rembrandt.

We then used an elevated printing technique on a 3D printer that output multiple layers of paint-based UV ink. The final height map determined how much ink was released onto the canvas during each layer of the printing process. In the end, we printed thirteen layers of ink, one on top of the other, to create a painting texture true to Rembrandt’s style.

Reconstructing A Lost Masterpiece – Caravaggio’s Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence

February 9, 2016 by Patrick

In 1969 Caravaggio’s Nativity was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in the heart of Palermo.

For many years the empty frame was a witness to its absence.

While making an exact copy of a painting is a painstaking and technologically challenging task, making a meaningful re-creation of a painting that no longer exists presents a different set of challenges. The aim was to produce an image that was in dialogue with Caravaggio’s masterpiece – and with Caravaggio himself – to make a performance of the Caravaggio painting that is faithful to the spirit of the original but made with today’s technologies and seen through the filter of today’s understanding. The gradual move from a 5×4 inch colour transparency to a physical re-materialisation of a painting that is almost 2 meters wide and over 2.5 meters high is a slow and collaborative affair that has involved many people with skills in photography, image processing, digital restoration, painting, restoration, art history, digital printing and varnishing.

In 2009, to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the death of Caravaggio, the Municipality of Caravaggio commissioned the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Factum Arte to make facsimiles of three paintings by Caravaggio in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.

The quality and accuracy of the documentation carried out by the team from Factum Arte was unparalleled at that time. Two photographic stages were necessary in order to capture every detail in the paintings. The first was high-resolution photography. All the paintings were photographed in small sections as 1:1 images taken at 700 dpi. This was done using equipment specifically designed to position the camera within the confined space of the chapel. The mosaic of photographs was then stitched together in Madrid to create one huge file for each painting (approximately 6 gigabytes for each painting). Factum Arte’s conservation experts also made exact colour charts which were an essential tool to ensure the correct hue, tone and colour when making the facsimiles. As 3D scanning of such dark glossy surfaces was impossible at that time macro raking-light images were also recorded. These images reveal subtle changes in the surface, the complex texture in the ground and paint layers, as well as the cracking and interventions made during restoration. This information was vital for recreating the texture and surface on the facsimiles made in 2010 – but it became the central tool for understanding how the Nativity was painted and how it would have looked when Caravaggio completed the painting.

The superficial qualities of paintings (those qualities pertaining to the surface) are critical to the way that we read and respond to them. The relationship between the surface and the colour works on many levels. Factum Arte has spent years trying to record and understand this relationship – it is this obsessive interest that differentiates the facsimiles produced with our specially designed equipment from normal copies. The process of digitally layering information, printing in multiple-layers onto specially prepared canvas on a flatbed printer, manually adjusting in paint, re-photographing at high-resolution, digitally checking every intervention to ensure that nothing is changed, digitally restoring the resulting photographs and then repeating the whole process lasted for almost 5 months.

Mat Collishaw – Whispering Weeds

December 1, 2015 by Patrick

https://vimeo.com/61901827

Inspired by Albrecht Dürer 1503 masterpiece, Great Piece of Turf, Mat Collishaw brings to life this famous Dürer watercolour study. The composition features a large piece of turf displaying wild plants like dandelions, creeping bent, meadow grass and hound’s tongue. Considered one of the masterpieces of Dürer’s nature studies, this work was primarily a tool to observe and reproduce the detail of the Bavarian landscape.

Mat Collishaw respectfully continues this minute observation and gives the roots and stems their own movement. The dynamic composition sways to a natural rhythm and the pale background imposes a sense of order and calm updating Dürer’s 16th century representation of nature into the 21st century.